Breed names staffer to facilitate housing

San Francisco Mayor London Breed on Thursday announced the appointment of Judson True as the city’s first director of housing delivery, a position she created to help speed up housing development in the city.

True will join Breed’s staff the first week of January after spending 8½ years working with Assemblyman David Chiu, most recently as his chief of staff. True previously worked as a legislative aide for Chiu when he was a San Francisco supervisor. True has also worked as a spokesman for the Municipal Transportation Agency.

“Judson True is a highly respected public servant with extensive experience in local and state government,” Breed said in a statement. She had planned to fill the position by the end of the year when she announced its creation back in October.

“We are in the middle of a housing crisis that is a result of not creating enough housing for decades. We need to streamline our overly complicated approval and permitting system, and I know that Judson has both the expertise and the experience to ensure that we create the housing that San Franciscans so desperately need,” she said.

Breed has set a goal of creating at least 5,000 units of housing each year, largely by halving the time it takes to get projects completed after receiving approvals from the Planning Commission.

Much of True’s work will center around steering proposed housing developments through San Francisco’s notoriously cumbersome permitting process.

Once projects receive the blessing of the Planning Commission, they have to thread through as many as eight city departments, which review development plans around things like fire safety, disability access and compliance with other building codes.

Most departments have different schedules, workloads and processes, and they can sometimes offer conflicting interpretation of the same codes, which grinds projects to a halt for years and can jeopardize financing as developers work with the city to suss out a solution.

True’s job will be to streamline permitting processes and break up logjams when they arise.

“I think it’s about better communication and making sure that real processes are in place so that we don’t solve problems anecdotally,” True said. “We need to do as much as we can right now, because we have projects that are approved and just waiting to become reality. The mayor has been incredibly clear about this, the desperate need for more housing.”

While working with Chiu, True helped pass a package of bills funding affordable housing projects and streamlining production at the state level. He’s also worked on legislation meant to spur housing creation on BART-owned parking lots and on the development of the Mission Rock neighborhood near AT&T Park.

True, who said he’d begin work the first week of January, is married to Breed’s deputy chief of staff, Andrea Bruss.